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Shelving and Shopping Carts Deliver Food in Dora, Alabama

A 2023 AARP Community Challenge grant helps a service provider transport and store supermarket supplies

Buying Shelving and Shopping Carts to Help Feed Dora, Alabama

Examples of the shelving and carts that are helping Mission of Hope volunteers and clients.

Courtesy Mission of Hope

In 25 years of working with seniors and families, Lori Abercrombie, director of Mission of Hope in Dora, Alabama, has never seen a larger array of issues facing older adults than now. As one example, she points to how, since 2020, there’s been a 75 percent increase in the number of older residents requesting food assistance.

Among the reasons: Dora (population 2,255) is located in Walker County, which, according to an annual report by the Alabama Opioid Overdose and Addiction Council, has the state’s highest rate of drug overdoses from fentanyl as well as legal opioids used for medical purposes. The county has the nation’s third highest rate of nonfatal opioid overdoses.

The crisis began in the early 2000s, when millions of legal prescription opioid pills flooded the county. At times, according to reporting by the Washington Post, so many pills were in circulation that the math calculated to 131 pills a year for every resident of Walker County. As a result of the addiction epidemic, many of Dora’s older residents are raising their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mission of Hope’s primary initiative is a drive-through food distribution program, provided twice monthly to more than 1,000 households, some 80 percent of which include an older adult. A smaller program delivers food to homebound senior citizens.

The organization received a 2023 AARP Community Challenge grant to help fund the programs.

At the drive-through location, volunteers wheel food from the warehouse to the waiting cars using grocery carts. Funds were used to purchase new carts.

For the food delivery program, funds were used to purchase commercial shelving for storing and organizing groceries and meals.

AARP Community Challenge

Mission of Hope: 2023 AARP Community Challenge grantee

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The Results — and Reactions

“Shopping carts may not sound like a big deal, but, honey, those things have been a godsend for us,” says Abercrombie, noting that at least 50 percent of the mission’s volunteers are 65 or older, with many in their 80s and many receiving food assistance themselves. “Helping their neighbors is a way to pay it forward.”

The carts make it easy to load up the food and get it to the people in their cars, Abercrombie explains. “When you're running 200 cars through in a short amount of time, you need good equipment to get that food there. If I don't have good equipment, the seniors are not going to volunteer. They physically cannot.”

One 78-year-old volunteer gushed about the new carts: "We went from Pintos to Cadillacs. The carts practically drive themselves. We can run to the cars with these!”

Advice for Replicating the Project

It Takes a Village: “People think, ‘Oh, I can only do this,' or 'I can only do that,’” says Abercrombie. “But somebody can collect canned soups, or come help bag food, or take food to a home. Everybody doing their little part makes a program like this work.”